Oral History Interview with Richard Mawdsley, 2010 August 21-22

Oral history interview with Richard Mawdsley, 2010 August 21-22 Funding for this interview was provided by the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Richard Mawdsley on 2010 August 21-22. The interview took place at Mawdsley's home in Carterville, Illinois, and was conducted by Mija Riedel for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America funded by the William and Mildred Lasdon Foundation. Richard Mawdsley has reviewed the transcript and has made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview MIJA RIEDEL: This is Mija Riedel with Richard Mawdsley in the artist’s home and studio in Carterville, Illinois on August 21st, 2010, for the Smithsonian’s Archives of America Art. This is card number one. Good afternoon—too late to be morning. Let’s start with some basic, early biographical data—where and when you were born and a bit about your childhood. RICHARD MAWDSLEY: I was born in Oxford, Kansas. I’m sorry—I was born in Winfield, Kansas. MS. RIEDEL: 1945? MR. MAWDSLEY: 1945. MS. RIEDEL: The date, July 11th, was it? MR. MAWDSLEY: Yes, July 11th. My mother was living there because my father was in the Navy in World War II. And that was her home, so I was born in Winfield, which was the closest hospital to Oxford. MS. RIEDEL: And your mother and father’s name, and what they—what they did? MR. MAWDSLEY: My mother is Evelyn and my father was Richard E. Mawdsley. And they were both schoolteachers. I know my father was a football and basketball coach and taught math and business and mechanical drawings, you know, taught a lot of different things. He ended his public school career as a counselor and in the mid-1950s probably got a job with the U.S. Air Force at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas as an educational officer, which was [his] official designation—what he did was help people in the Air Force who wanted to better their education. He made arrangements for them to go to college or take college classes or—at the time, in the Air Force, if you didn’t have a high school education, you were required to finish. And he would take care of that business, too, with those people. And well, he did all kinds of stuff. I mean, he had—he had a staff of a couple of enlisted men that worked with him and he did that until he retired, probably did that for 20 years almost and worked for 40 years all together between teaching in high school and working from the Air Force. My mother started—my mother taught when she first got out of college. And then she did not work until—again until my sister went to college. MS. RIEDEL: So you had siblings? MR. MAWDSLEY: I have a younger brother and an older sister. My mother taught English at the junior high that I went to. And she taught there for 20 years probably before she retired. My parents thought themselves as somewhat progressive people for Kansas, which is, you know—[they laugh]— well, does that say much? I don’t know. But we had, like, Heywood-Wakefield furniture, which is now real collectible, which my niece has, and I’m happy she has it because I don’t want—[inaudible]. You know, it’s, you know, modernism. It was a modernism-for-the-masses kind of situation. MS. RIEDEL: So there was a design sensibility? MR. MAWDSLEY: Yes, when we would go on vacation, which wasn’t often because they couldn’t afford it often, but there was always an art museum. When we went to St. Louis, we went to the art museum. If we went to Denver, we went to the art museum in Denver. Wichita has an art museum, which we would frequent—almost as often as we did the countdown, which was their recreation of their cowboy and Indian days. And we all played musical instruments. MS. RIEDEL: Really? What did you play? MR. MAWDSLEY: Oh, I didn’t—I play at the French horn. [They laugh.] I was never very good. My sister was the one that actually was pretty good at it. She played the oboe and she was pretty good at it. My brother played the clarinet and he was as bad at the clarinet as I was at the French horn. So there that sense of sort of—[inaudible]. But we all just dissipated in—well, I am not sure if my brother did in high school or not, but both my sister and I played music in high school. MS. RIEDEL: Were there art classes in elementary school and junior high, high school? MR. MAWDSLEY: I started drawing when I was—before I could remember. And I drew constantly and took—they had art periods. Every once in a while in grade school they would have an art project— MS. RIEDEL: Okay. MR. MAWDSLEY: —once a month, once every two weeks. It wasn’t often, but once in a while they had them. And I spent a lot of time in classes, throughout college, throughout my education, doodling. So in seventh grade, everybody was required to take an art class. And I had Mr. Bachelor, who was a weird old man—I guess you shouldn’t say that—but a good—really good art teacher. And I had him for art in the seventh grade. Then, I took it as an elective in the ninth grade. I was a freshman. MS. RIEDEL: Drawing and painting and in 3-D—[inaudible]? MR. MAWDSLEY: Drawing and painting, no three-dimensional art whatsoever—and he had a very structured, traditional art class but he recognized and—by the same token, recognized and encouraged creativity and pointed out creativity whenever it happened. And so I got a really good structural base in terms of visual mark making from that man. He was an amateur actress—actor, was in a lot of local theater. The parts he played, he was a little weird man— parts that did him real well. [They laugh.] And my mother was always very proud of me and always kept him apprised of what I was doing. And when I would—you know, when my work was published somewhere, he’d be sure—she would show it to him. And so I don’t remember the last time I saw him. It’s been a long time. But you know, it was a positive experience. MS. RIEDEL: Sounds like if—that’s a long-term relationship, if that was a junior high and high school art teacher. MR. MAWDSLEY: Yes, and—well, junior high at the time was three grades; it was seventh, eighth and ninth grade or—freshman was also at the junior high at the time. MS. RIEDEL: So he was really a junior high teacher. MR. MAWDSLEY: He is a junior high teacher, yeah. MS. RIEDEL: It sounds as if art was something that was valued in the family as well. Many people paid attention to it. MR. MAWDSLEY: I think so, yes. They gave me private music lessons, which I just—you know, I just didn’t relate to music at all or at least didn’t play it well, until I finally insisted that they stop. MS. RIEDEL: [Laughs.] MR. MAWDSLEY: Yes, the teacher agreed with the fact that I wasn’t doing or wasn’t progressing or it wasn’t doing a lot of good. And at the time, Wichita State University had a fairly well-recognized music program at the time—I don’t know if it still does or not, so I had some pretty good—they were college guys or people in graduate school sometimes, too, that were pretty proficient French horn players. And they would often show me how it was supposed to be played, and it sounded really good when they played it. It sounded really bad when I played it. MS. RIEDEL: [Laughs.] MR. MAWDSLEY: So anyway—and at one time, they were contemplating giving me private art lessons, but, oh, whatever happened to that? Never did pan out— MS. RIEDEL: Was that something you wanted to do? Or was that a substitute? MR. MAWDSLEY: You know, I was sort of—you know, it was just something that I enjoyed. And if they would’ve done it, I would’ve gone along [with] it. And if it didn’t happen, it was something that was not a problem. MS. RIEDEL: Okay. MR. MAWDSLEY: I took art throughout high school, you know, teachers came and went. I had no three- dimensional work at all in high school, either. It was all variations of drawing and painting or classical, commercial design, which was basically 2-D. I shouldn’t even say this, but I got a poster out in my shop that I made when I was in high school. MS. RIEDEL: Oh, I have to take a look at that. MR. MAWDSLEY: Oh, it’s really bad. MS. RIEDEL: [Laughs.] MR. MAWDSLEY: [Inaudible.] Anyway, oftentimes, I was the art guy, and the band teacher liked to have a good time.

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